In the summer of 2017, Australian writer Anna Funder had hit “peak overload”, dragged down by the weight of domestic duties crowding out her work deadlines. Her frustrations came to a head one day after yet another “soul-sapping” trip to a mall to get groceries because that was just part of being a wife, mother and multitasking homemaker.
But it had all tipped over into a mad scramble for time and space. Funder’s husband, Craig Allchin, was a busy architect, but she was a busy professional, too – as a writer, a translator of French and German, which she speaks fluently, and a documentary film-maker. She is currently attached to the University of Technology Sydney’s creative writing school as a researcher.
Her portfolio of roles came after working as a human rights lawyer in the Australian attorney-general’s office in Canberra until the mid-90s, when she stunned her colleagues by quitting the job to move, alone, to Berlin to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.
The result was the publication of her first book, Stasiland (2002), a courageous investigation of the Stasi security apparatus, which terrorised the people of East Germany for 40 years. In 2004, the book won the British Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Her debut novel, All That I Am (2011), about a group of German-Jewish dissidents in pre-war London, won Australia’s prestigious Miles Franklin Award.
But in 2017, Funder felt her overcrowded life had reached an impasse. “How did I get here?” she asks in her new book, Wifedom, describing the day she drove around the mall car park, mocked by the “empty promises” of the exit signs. “I could never really leave,” she writes in the book. “The mall had sucked out my privileged, perimenopausal soul. I had to get her back.”
As meltdowns go, Funder’s was relatively sedate. Instead of heading home to her Victorian villa in the central Sydney suburb of Glebe, she left the groceries in the boot – to hell with the ice cream – and went into Sappho Books on Glebe Point Rd. One of the best second-hand bookshops in Sydney, Sappho is a place where you find “what you don’t even know you need”.
And there it was, in the upstairs non-fiction section: a first-edition, four-volume series of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, real name Eric Blair, a writer Funder had always revered for the sharp acuity of his pioneering novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. She sat down and started to read.
When she returned home, Orwell went too. Reading that collection marked a turning point, a path to several years of research, travelling, writing and, at last, the publication of Wifedom, an exhilarating blend of reportage, feminist outrage and imaginative recreation.
Wifedom, released last year, introduces us to Orwell’s wife, Eileen Blair, to whom he was married from 1936 until her death, aged 39, in 1945. A strong, intelligent woman, she has been ignored in most accounts of the writer’s life, including his own journals and letters.
Wifedom’s subtitle is Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. The book does more than examine the Orwell marriage. It deplores women’s unpaid/underpaid labour in patriarchal systems, including Funder’s critique of her own “wifedom” as “a privileged white woman”. She also radically re-evaluates Orwell, separating the man from the writer.
In her happy place
Funder, who’s here for the Auckland Writers Festival in May, tells the Listener on the phone from Sydney about the day it all started. “That day at the mall, I got to a point where I thought, ‘Why do I have this huge overload?’ I wouldn’t recommend it,” she says. “I ended up in this beautiful bookshop, my happy place, and found the essays.
“I read my way through them during the summer, as well as working on a screenplay for a TV series based on Stasiland, looking after the kids, dealing with a depressed French exchange student, medical issues in the family, wondering what my falling-down house was doing, and so on. To read those volumes was to watch Orwell – or Eric Blair – find his writing self, his persona. And that was a really lovely thing to do.”
Something chimed deeply with Funder as she read his most famous essay, “Why I Write”, where he claims that after the age of 30, many people “live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered by drudgery”.
However, he continued, “gifted, wilful people live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class”.
Funder felt compelled to “look under [her own] motherload of wifedom and see who was left”, she writes. She created a plan to read everything she could find written by or about Orwell, in the hope that his exposure of “the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time”, would allow her to “use him to liberate myself from mine”.
Boorish & selfish
Instead, her research uncovered some smelly little truths hidden beneath the hail-fellow, common-man veneer presented by Orwell and his biographers. The most unpleasant elements include his boorish attitude towards women and sex, and, in particular, his staggeringly selfish treatment of his clever, well-educated wife. Some of the things she discovered about the marriage gave Funder “a frisson of horror”.
The essays contained the first clue: Eileen was barely there. “After that, I read the six major biographies and she is a very faint presence,” she says.
But suddenly, Eileen sprang into view. Six of her letters to her friend Norah Myles were discovered in 2005 and included as an addendum to one of the more recent Orwell biographies. They cover the exact length of the marriage and chronicle a relationship that was fraught from its first day, when the newlyweds moved to a decrepit cottage/grocery shop in Wallington, Hertfordshire.
Orwell was poor and chronically ill, with nothing to offer Eileen except his intellect. She, though, was about to become his domestic drudge.
The letters made a perfect linking device for Funder’s narrative, adding authenticity to the “counterfiction” she created to fill in the void left by the biographers.
In Wallington, Orwell planned to write upstairs in the cottage, while Eileen’s duties included caring for him, running the shop, tending the vegetable garden, taking the resident goat for walks, and unblocking the outside toilet.
As an English graduate from the University of Oxford (Orwell had no tertiary education), she also became his typist, editor and adviser. His work started to improve almost immediately. “The biographers minimise her impact on his work, which was hugely significant,” says Funder, “and on his life, which she managed to save, extend and support, financially, intellectually and domestically.”
Eileen’s first letter, from November 1936, comes six months after the wedding.
“She writes to Norah and says she’s been working in a way that really surprises her, in this cottage with no electricity, no heating, no lights. She says she’s sorry it has taken so long to write, ‘but we have quarrelled so continuously and really bitterly that I thought I’d save time and just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation has been accomplished’.
“It’s really marvellous and you can’t read that without wondering who was this very funny, very witty woman who really had the measure of Orwell and what the marriage was like from her point of view.”
To find information about Eileen’s life, Funder turned to the biographies’ sources and footnotes, and followed the trail. Orwell’s service during the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37 is a familiar story, forming the basis of his book Homage to Catalonia. What wasn’t known was that Eileen was in Barcelona for almost the same length of time, working in real danger at the International Labour Party (ILP) headquarters, which supported the anti-fascists. She lived at the Hotel Continental on La Rambla, a hotbed of spies.
With General Franco supported by the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, Eileen and Eric Blair were both named in the Stalinists’ “kill list” for treason. But, Funder notes, one of Orwell’s biographers said she was in Spain “because she wanted to send him margarine, chocolates and cigars at the front”. In fact, Eileen’s time in Spain, which Funder uncovered through sources such as the ILP records, was heroic and brave.
“To find her in Spain, I reverse-engineered Homage to Catalonia and every time something happened in the passive voice, I switched it to find out who did it,” says Funder. “Quite often it was Eileen.
“So, the lack of curiosity and the erasure by Orwell in his account of the war, which she later typed up and edited, is incredible.”
Pouncing on women
Sex was a problem for Orwell, a philanderer who boasted about his conquests and claimed his marriage was “open”, a lie the biographies repeated without evidence.
His predatory habit of “pouncing” on women he barely knew was also masked by those writers. “They say he was a ‘pouncer’. That’s a euphemism the biographers use when what they really mean is he was sexually assaulting women at the literary magazine offices he was working at for a while, or in a park. It makes it sound playful, when in fact it would have been terrifying if you were the person being pounced on.”
Orwell’s sexual style was rapid-fire, recorded by various women as ending with his phrase, “Aah, that’s better.”
“I don’t think he was remotely interested in women, sexually,” says Funder. “He wasn’t getting the sex he really wanted.”
She believes he was probably gay, a deduction based on her readings, including comments in his last literary notebook, where he describes “two great facts about women which … you could only learn by getting married.” These were that women possess an “incorrigible dirtiness” and a “terrible devouring sexuality”.
Orwell could only have been writing about his wife, who steadfastly supported him until her death on March 29, 1945, about nine months after they adopted a baby (Richard Blair, who was brought up by his Aunt Avril, Orwell’s sister).
Funder’s chapter on Eileen’s final days, when she travelled to Newcastle alone on a bus to get a cut-price operation for a hysterectomy, is awful.
Before the operation, she wrote to Orwell, saying, “I really don’t think I’m worth the money.” Eileen’s lonely fear in hospital is illustrated by an Orwell Archive image of her last letter to her husband, where her handwriting starts to slope and fade as the morphine takes hold. Severely anaemic, she died on the operating table.
‘A good old stick’
After her death, Orwell told his friend, the poet Stephen Spender, “She was a good old stick.”
Then he embarked on a search for his next wife, proposing to at least four women he scarcely knew until he married the second Mrs Orwell, Sonia Brownell. By then, he was dying, hospitalised with the TB that had affected his health for years, when he had been carefully tended by Eileen, in sickness and in health. The second marriage lasted for 14 weeks until he, too, died, on January 21, 1950, aged 46.
Despite the flaws she found in her literary hero, Funder still respects his work, but let’s give credit to Eileen as well, she says.
“I do, I absolutely do admire his work. I think Animal Farm is his best work and she did a lot to make it what it is. Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he did alone after her death, is paranoid and grim, sadistic, violent and misogynist. It’s also important because, as he predicted, we now live in an age of almost total surveillance … and the world is full of authoritarian regimes making global blocs.”
She believes Eileen had the talent and intellect to write a novel herself, but she would never have had the time or support she needed from her husband.
“Orwell said he needed someone to encourage him. It is more difficult when the world makes it your job to burnish the ego and self-esteem of a man so he can write, whereas it’s not his job to do that for her; it is not reciprocated.
“But if she had been able to write a book, it would have been Animal Farm on steroids, or something completely different – a novel with real people, real psychological insight and enormous humour.”
Anna Funder will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival, Aotea Centre, on May 17 and May 18: see writersfestival.co.nz To book tickets go here
